4 ms·

Then why are we 8 weeks into this and the US has tested approximately no one, while other countries are testing thousands per day? Wtf are these 1500 people doi

• smt88 7y ago
  Each test kit has a limited number of uses[. The first batch of thousands of test kits had a flaw and couldn't be used[1]. With a limited number of kits, they had to limit testing to high-risk people. As I've written on HN before, a great deal of the problem is that the current administration appoints political donors and anti-government activists to important roles in agencies handling science and medicine. These are mid-level people whose names almost never end up in news. So you have incompetent decision makers appointed throughout the organization, funding cuts, discouragement of civil service at all (through things like killing debt forgiveness and stagnating wages), and an administration that publicly denies the problem is even serious because it's afraid of the stock market tanking. Add to that that the State Dept has been gutted and has many hundreds of open positions that the administration refuses to fill, and you have more disasters like allowing likely-infected Americans to return to the US without testing or quarantine. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-testing-cdc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-testin...
  • senordevnyc 7y ago
    Oh, i'm 100% on board with the fact that it's not the experts' fault. But it's also not at all fair to say "Thousands of people are working on this, so we can't be sleepwalking!" and that's what I was responding to. Thousands of people might be working on this, but if their work is being ignored or undermined, they might as well not be.